FREDA 2009 - Students' Blog

Tuesday, 23 March 2010

Now that I've managed to get the podcast on the blog, I should probably say what it's about. Jess, Stacey and Tom talk about the Poe short story, The Tell Tale Heart, using the approaches of a corpus-based lexical overview, the application of Grice's Maxims and the use of core and non-core vocabulary.If anyone takes any major umbridge or just wants to talk about anything raised (or if you think we left out something important) pop it on the blog and someone will get back to you shortly!

Thanks a lot, enjoy, and I look forward to listening to the work you've all been doing too.

Saturday, 20 March 2010

of related interest to what has been covered over the past couple of weeks is Charlie Brooker's 'Newswipe' that was first screened on BBC 4 and which you may have already seen. It is now accessible from YouTube. Basically it investigates how news is constructed, how it is told, why this may be so, and the implications of this upon the public.

Monday, 8 March 2010

You can now find our podcast by clicking 'here'. The literary extract commented upon can also be located by clicking 'here'.

The extract discussed in the podcast is the first page of Chapter 1 of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962).

The first speaker in the podcast (Joe) considers the prevalence of noun groups and examines their characteristics and the effect upon the reader.

The second speaker (James) looks at the lexis and the lexical use, identifying core and non-core words. Phrases are also examined, analysing their (differing) connotations and how this contributes to the subext of the text. Carter's 'Figures of Speech' (on WebCt) and the OED is referred to.

The third speaker (Reena) examines a specific phrase and scrutinises the different effects the individual words in the phrase produces.

Monday, 7 December 2009

At present I have labelled the voices in order they initially spoke. 'A' and 'B' for the female students and 'C' for the male student. In my recording (9-3) there seems to be a dominant voice: female 'A', thereby distinguishes her from the other female voice. So how, as group, would we like to label the voices?

P.S: thank you to the students in my recording for speaking so clearly and succinctly; it made my task of transcribing much easier. On the other hand, I'll like to apologise to those who had the task of transcribing (translating) my voice!

P.P.S Has anyone seen Francis Coppola's film, The Conversation?Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert who eavesdrops on a young couple's mid-day tete-a-tete. Though he merely records (rather than transcribes) he becomes obsessed (among other things) with his subject's utterance 'he'd kill us if he had the chance'. It implies that the young couple are engaged in an adulterous affair and thecuckold husband would punished the couple, if not kill them. However, the utterance's meaning is determined by the intonation/emphasis, which Gene Hackman only realises towards the end (exacerbating his already tenuous hold on reality). The utterance with the intonation is 'he'd kill us if he had the chance' implicating the couple with the murder of the cuckold husband. The film, thus, demonstrates the elusiveness of meaning and the attempts we make to anchor meaning to an empirical reality. (Check Antonioni's Blow-up which inspired the film.)

Monday, 16 November 2009

FREDA Week 8Discussion of Elinor Och’s text: “Transcription as Theory”We discussed how selectivity can alter the perception of an interaction and the conclusions drawn from it. A key quote from the reading is: “a more useful transcript is a more selective one”. This then led us to consider the effects of omitting certain non-verbal elements from our transcription and how their potential inclusion would alter the conclusions drawn about their role in discourse and their importance in the specific transcription. We continued to question how our group recording would be affected by these ideas and how a transcription would capture effectively what the interlocutors considered memorable and how different a transcription will be.